Repetitive Dying

(c) 2019

My average age at death has been thirty-five and in some centuries

that has been long enough. This time, I feel behind the mark,

like I've lost something, have been buried one too many time.

All these recurring cycles and all I have to show is loss and fragments

of memory like pieces of broken mirrors. I recall

sitting on the stoop, wearing my favorite red and blue stripped jersey,

marbles in hand, scattered jacks. I was six, freckle-faced

and all I wanted was to play with my big brother, to not be left out.

When his basketball bounced off the backboard and rolled into the street

well, how could I have seen that car? 

Once by car, once train and previously a carriage.

This world is crowded with people hurtling nowhere fast. 

Of course I was a witch. What woman wasn't?

In Germany. In the house of MacDougall of Lorn 

they nicknamed me Chorra thon du, the Black-bottomed Heron,

and accused me of turning my husband into a wandering spectre

after his death. In Ireland, in France,

and especially in Spain. In America I was a witch. In Nigeria.

I did not drown when they dunked me. It took the branding,

the burning, it took the rack to get me to confess.

Yes, I cavorted with the Devil, embraced the incubus and succubus both.

I did not drown like normal women do, but when they lashed me

to four other women, and lit us, I burned just like a woman.

Incarnation after incarnation, and I am constantly struggling for life.

When I was widowed among the Igbo

my husband’s family confiscated the house and land,

and kept my children to work in their homes.

I performed the traumatic wailing, as was expected. I beat my chest,

flung my arms, hysterically calling the name only I knew him by.

His Umuokpu did not find me contrite enough.

They barricaded me in the house with his corpse. Flies buzzed

at his open wounds, at the moisture crusting at his mouth and eyes.

At sunrise his sisters roused me with icy water, beat me

for not lamenting loudly enough.

The sister who shaved my head had not even had the time

for her own shaven hair to grow back.

For twelve months I was isolated from the village, subject

to a rigorous ostracism, a mutual vow of silence taken against me.

I mourned, not for my husband, but for me.

Influenza, small pox, the guillotine, ritual sacrifice, childbirth.

I keep hoping for comfort, or better, for strength enough to overcome

the pervasive sorrow, the residue, of those other incarnations.

Once again, I fail life. I sit in the dark, nursing gin.

The way I am smoking, I’ll have emphysema by 9 p.m.

It will match the cancer in my breasts. The way I figure it,

I am already dead.